Aging
On the fact I'm now tweezers-permanently-in-my-car-years old
How does it happen, exactly? I mean, biologically, I get it. All energy breaks down. But I am suddenly starting to see and feel the difference and I think that’s the disconcerting part. There might have been a small part of me that thought I was going to be the exception to this aging process. Denial is a handy tool.
Overall, I’m healthy. We started going to the gym almost daily about three months ago. Earlier in the year, back in Jersey, I had been going to a personal trainer to try to give myself a kick in the ass, and to learn more about what kinds of things I could do to improve my strength. Being in perimenopause and knowing how much losing estrogen has a myriad of effects on a woman’s body, including bone loss and muscles atrophying, I have been telling myself for the last couple years that I really needed to learn how to exercise for real before it was too late. So when 2024 started, I finally made good on that self-threat. I’m definitely stronger and more active than I’ve been for a while and that feels fantastic. And yet, I find myself being careful.
Do you remember a time when you thought nothing of jetting out to the car in the middle of winter? Or stepping up on a ladder? Or picking up a heavy bag of garden soil? All things I used to do without fear of wrecking my back, breaking a bone, or losing my balance. That part suddenly happened. But I don’t really know when.
My good friend Suzanne has a fantastic Substack of writing prompts. It started as a yearly project—52 Writing Prompts—but did so well that she just kept going with it! If you love prompted writing or you’re stuck and need something to jumpstart the practice, check out Suzanne’s posts. I do from time to time mostly because I enjoy her writing, but I decided I’d give the Aging and Mortality prompt a go.
First she asks you to write a list of age-related changes in body or mind.
Here’s my list:
Loss of flexibility, though still pretty flexible.
Can’t do a cartwheel anymore, would never try again
Two gray hairs….how is there only two?
Weight gain
Lower tolerance or patience for things like small children and loud noise
Skin is soft and thinning
Eyes are getting that droop, jowls are forming. Shudder.
I write so much more and want to have a real job so much less
I like my life - love it, in fact.
I have tweezers in my car. Permanently.
Weakening bladder and bowel control - scary to think about
Drink more
Saggy breasts, or getting there anyway
Then she asks you to pick one of your list items and write on that alone. So I picked the tweezers and wrote this:
I’m tweezers-are-permanently-in-my-car years old. They’re pink. I’m not sure why. Maybe to cheer women up while they pluck an errant hair from their upper lip or chin, or forehead, as is in my case. That random forehead hair happens to be gray and currently one of the only two gray hairs I have. I don’t have any idea how this is possible, nearing fifty and still not going gray—but I am not complaining! I do also get a bit of a mustache, but it’s still pretty slow growing. I remember relentlessly teasing my mom when she was my age, actually younger because by the time she was 49 she’d moved away to Florida. She took my goading in good stride, but never removed the hair as far as I remember. As soon as mine starts to darken, I get out the Nair. Or tweezers. Waxing makes me break out terribly and I found that out the hard way once when I left the salon and ended up with a bright red “mustache” for days. Nair is kind of gross but does a fine enough job. For now. The tweezers take out the rest. Plucking hair from your lip is painful, not like the satisfactory pull from between your eyebrows. Not as bad as a nose hair, but the sting is there. Once I met two women at a conference and as they introduced themselves to me, I noticed one of them had a hair at least an inch long sticking straight out of her nose. It was almost impossible to not look at and I wanted to pull her friend aside and say “tell her!” Sometimes I wonder why we have to worry about silly things, and I remember I don’t, but that I also hate those hairs on my face. The older I get, the more appear and so I suppose it will be a battle between us til the end.
Not earth shattering, but fine. It’s a prompt to get you thinking. So then I kept thinking about my body which is not something I let myself do often at all…
I've never been much of a salon go-er. I get a haircut a couple times a year, sometimes a manicure or pedicure if there’s a special occasion, and that’s it. I don’t like being fawned over, pampered, or examined under a microscope, so the salon experience has never been all that enjoyable—except that I do love a good blowout. That’s worth tolerating the pampering. I’ve always been a bit fascinated at the women who spend so much time and money at these places between cuts, coloring, waxing, painting, tanning, bleaching, threading, and I don’t even know what else goes on because I don’t do it. The idea of any part of my body being so scrutinized is beyond uncomfortable. But at the same time, I think it’s probably fun to feel that beautiful or cared for in that way–for them. I understand it to a degree, it just doesn’t feel that way for me. And it makes me wonder why?
When I was younger and had to have my makeup done for a commercial or print-ad modeling gig, it was something I mostly endured. I loved the outcome, of course, but having someone up in my face like that was off-putting. At times I’d be afraid to breathe wrong. These thoughts would be appropriate coming from a woman whose mother was critical and constantly worried about her own age and appearance, which flows over to daughters. But I don’t have a mother like that. My mom beared through me and my sister ruthlessly teasing her about her mustache and did nothing about it. She didn’t care. Or maybe, like me, she was too insecure to spend more than an hour at a salon past a haircut. She thankfully never imparted any toxic-femininity—vanity? I’m not sure what the right word is—onto her girls. We were allowed to be who we were—me a barefoot kid who wore dresses in the mud, and my sister, who was never partial to mud, but cut her hair clean and short soon into adulthood and kept it that way. Only our father ever took issue with that.
As I get older, I also find that I’m more attuned to the things about my body that I don’t like, which feels backwards. Not that I loved everything about myself when I was fourteen, but now there are “problems” that seem exaggerated and aspects that never bothered me when I was younger now do. Like my nose. I never had a second thought–or a first thought–about my nose when I was young. Now it seems like all my Italian heritage decided to stake a claim as an intruder on my face. I look in the mirror and think, did you get bigger? No. That’s not a thing, right? Noses getting bigger? Bodies shrink, feet flatten, joints hurt, boobs sag. All widely accepted pitfalls of aging. But your nose is supposed to stay the same, isn’t it?!
Ah. Getting older is so fun.
But did you see number 9 on my list? When I did that part of the prompt, it just came out organically. I was listing things I didn’t like and suddenly thought: But I love my life. And you know, I didn’t always love my life. Aging is a privilege that makes that even clearer to me—with age has come so much more peace about things that previously made me a bit crazy. It has calmed me, taught me to be protective of what’s really important, and how to apologize. Getting older can suck, for sure. It’s sometimes painful, it can make you nostalgic and sad, it can make you spend money on treatments and procedures because you’re just not ready for that reflection yet. And that’s all okay. I’ve always wanted to “age with grace” but everyone has their own version of what that grace looks like for them. Wrestling with a healthy vanity and the years ticking up is not easy. And then enters perimenopause—a whole other essay. Let’s all be kind to ourselves. Make your lists, but make sure to include the good parts too. <3
You're one of the good parts of MY list. :)